Large and complex IT management environments that provide multiple services to a plurality of customers can create an unmanageable number of entities. A configuration management database contains data objects (configuration records) which represent an extensive range of logical and physical entities and their complex relationships. A configuration management database is a repository for information related to all the components (configuration items) of an information system. Although repositories similar to configuration management databases have been used by IT departments for many years, the term configuration management database stems from ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). In the ITIL context, a configuration management database represents the authorized configuration of the significant components of the IT environment. A key goal of a configuration management database is to help an organization understand the relationships between these components and track their configuration. The configuration management database is a fundamental component of the ITIL framework's configuration management process. An information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) is a set of guidelines for information technology (IT) service management. ITIL consists of a series of publications giving guidance on the provision of quality IT-services, and on the processes and facilities needed to support them. ITIL guidelines are considered best practice guidelines for an IT-service. Best practice is a technique, method, activity, or process that is considered more effective at providing a particular outcome than any other technique, method, activity or process. A typical implementation of a configuration management database may contain more than 800 abstract object classes, with implicit and explicit relationships between them that may be extended in an open-ended fashion.
Normally, a configuration management database is a repository which is accessed by other systems, for example, an incident management system which provides messages relating, for example, to a failure of a configuration item. Since the incident management system often uses a different identification scheme to that used by the configuration management database, it is difficult to identify a configuration record based on the information from the message. However, the information stored in the configuration management database may be crucial to remedy the failure to which the message refers. Therefore, it is desirable to obtain further information about a configuration item which is stored in the configuration management database and affected by a failure merely on the basis of information from a message although the message uses identifiers which are incompatible with the attribute names of the configuration management database.
Usually information systems use artificially generated keys (surrogate keys) to identify objects. These keys are easy to use for relationships inside a database, but are of little use outside. External systems use other artifacts to identify an object uniquely (typically called “natural keys”). But sometimes the external system does not have all the information needed to build such a natural key or does not know how to build it.
Therefore, the problem addressed by this invention is to identify an object in a configuration management database without having knowledge about its identification method/scheme.